Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840

`From an Antique Land'

Nigel Leask

A pioneering exploration of the rich field of Romantic-period travelogues, viewed as literary works as well as historical documents.

Traces the evolving aesthetics of travel-writing from the late Enlightenment to the start of Victoria's reign, via concepts of 'curiosity', antiquarianism, and the picturesque to the flowering of the Romantic 'transcendental self'.

An important contribution to the debate about colonial discourse and a reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and empire.

Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840

`From an Antique Land'

Nigel Leask

Description

The first book of its kind to study the Romantic obsession with the "antique lands" of Ethiopia, Egypt, India, and Mexico, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing is an important contribution to the recent wave of interest in exotic travel writing. Drawing generously on both original texts and modern scholarship in literature, history, geography, and anthropology, it focuses on the unstable discourse of "curiosity" to offer an important reformulation of the relations between literature, aesthetics, and colonialism in the period.

Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840

`From an Antique Land'

Nigel Leask

Table of Contents

Introduction: Practices and Narratives of Romantic Travel1. Cycles of Accumulation, Curiosity, and Temporal Exchange2. Curious Narratives and the Problem of Creidt: James Bruce's 'Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile'3. 'Young Menmon' and Romantic Egyptomania: pt. 1 Shelley's 'Ozymandias' and Napoleon's Savants; pt. 2 Belzoni, Burckhardt, and the 'Rape of the Nile'4. Indian Travel Writing and the Imperial Picturesque5. Domesticating Distance: Three Women Travel Writers in British India6. Alexander von Humboldt and the Romantic Imagination of America (the Impossibility of Personal Narrative)Conclusion: William Bullock's Mexico and the Reassertion of Popular CuriosityBibliographyIndex

Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840

`From an Antique Land'

Nigel Leask

Reviews and Awards

"This is a timely, engrossing, and important revisionary account of Romantic period travel writing.... Leask's approach is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, ingenuity, and subtlety."--Byron Journal

"Wide-ranging and discriminating.... Leask's book is refreshingly comparative, and boldly breaks new ground.... He unsettles a number of orthodoxies which have cramped our understanding of what happened when Western Europeans travelled outside the boundaries of their own civilization."--Times Literary Supplement

"Addresses the intersections between space and time more fully than any other recent book on Romantic travel.... Leask's detailed study contributes valuably to the body of criticism on Romantic travel literature and, more broadly, to criticism on Romantic conceptions of place and space."--European Romantic Review

"The analysis Leask gives of the problems at the heart of travel writing should prove of interest to students of the early novel and of nascent ethnography and anthropology. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing is scholarship of high caliber." --Eighteenth-Century Life